One Less Thing Mobile Website Redesign

One Less Thing: Mobile site redesign

Overview

Design and test a new user flow for users to create a job listing in order to increase conversions to a paid subscription.

TEam

As a 3-person team, we conducted research and created a high fidelity interactive prototype over one 2-week sprint. My role was project manager, and I also conducted research and usability testing, and wireframed our designs.

The Challenge

One Less Thing, a local services marketplace that connects customers with college students to hire for things they need done, approached my team with the problem that users weren't converting to paid subscribers. She wanted us to test her checkout flow and iterate as needed, designing for mobile.

User Problem

Solution

Redesign onboarding and "create a job" flow to increase users' trust in One Less Thing in order to increase conversion by 3%.

Impact

When implemented, this redesign will increase trustworthiness and value proposition to users, as proven by an increase in conversions to a paid account (KPI: 3% increase)

My Role: Project Manager and UX Designer

Performed market and user research, including surveys and interviews, to understand landscape and conducted a competitive analysis and heuristic evaluation of competitors

Conducted a heuristic analysis of current website to diagnose issues

Surveyed current users about their behaviors and attitudes

Ideated, sketched, and created wireframes, with iterations informed by usability testing results.

Served as sole point of contact with client, communicating business needs and feedback to the design team

Research

Our first step was to review OLT's Google analytics to see if we could pinpoint why users might not be completing the conversion funnel. What we discovered was that about half of users weren't even getting past the homepage, let alone all the way to creating an account and paying for a subscription. Conversely, our research showed that users who did make it past the homepage were moving to the student login page at a higher rate than to "how it works" or "employer login", so the student side of the website was comparatively in better shape. Therefore, we decided to target our homepage redesign toward users who would be hiring helpers.

Almost half of visitors bounce from the home page

Why are half of visitors bouncingfrom the first page they land on?

Through a heuristic evaluation, we diagnosed the problem as "death by a thousand paper cuts" in terms of usability, clarity, and value proposition. The biggest issues we discovered through user interviews and preliminary usability testing were that users didn't understand what the website did, and they didn't feel that it provided enough value to them to find out more. We crafted 3 surveys and conducted additional user interviews to validate our hypotheses, which we synthesized into an affinity map. These insights helped inform our persona, Sue, who we continually referred back to during the design process.

Affinity map of our user's needs

Primary Persona

Goals

Hire someone trustworthy

Build a relationship with the people she works with

Have a pool of people she can call on when she needs help

Frustrations

Lack of community help

Not enough time in the day to get everything done

Sick of interviewing someone new every time she needs help

Designing the Homepage

In redesigning the homepage, we began with a round of "crazy eights", a timed exercise where each team member individually sketched out our ideas. We then translated the promising ones to the whiteboard, where we used "dot voting" to pinpoint which elements we wanted to explore further.

Preliminary homepage ideas on whiteboard

Then we sketched out two different layouts of the homepage to A/B test hero image size, number and layout of CTA buttons, hierarchy of "how it works", testimonials, and featured user profiles.

Two initial homepage sketches

Once we had some user feedback about the two different versions of the homepage, we set out to sketch a new version that incorporated what worked and left out what didn't.

Mapping out the User Flow

Sketching out our competitors' user flows

Designing a homepage that encourages users to click through was only the first step in getting them to convert to a paid subscription. The next step was to design an onboarding and payment flow that encourages trust, comfort, and value.

As part of our research, we conducted a competitive analysis of four of OLT's top competitors (TaskRabbit, Care.com, Urban Sitter, and Takl) to see how they were handling the user flow of creating a job listing. We especially focused on and A/B tested the following:

Should users be able to preview potential candidates before paying?

Yes, it builds value and trust in the service.

At what point should users be prompted to create an account in order to proceed?

As late as possible in the flow, in order to build value for the user.

We used these insights to map out a flow that is in line with industry standards and advocates for the user at every step.

Sue's happy path

Designing the "Create a Job" flow

Once we had a flow, we began to design the screens, beginning with hand sketched wireframes. We then tested and iterated, going through 4 rounds of usability testing. We iterated to improve clarity, increase value prop and user trust, and include elements that were previously overlooked.

3 iterations of the create a job page

Designing the Dashboard

Finally, our user flow needed to have a dashboard where users could view and edit jobs they had posted, reply to job applications, and manage their account and profile. Since it was the end of our user flow, and was not interactive in our prototype, meaning that user feedback was limited, so iterations were more based on assumptions and visual clarity than usability testing results.